Romeo Blue (5 page)

“Yup,” said Derek.

We passed a jeep carrying a naval officer going the other way out along the peninsula to the point. He was probably headed to the Coast Guard station out there. The Coast Guard had started patrolling the beach below us. They were also seen along the rocky cliffs to the north of our house along the coast, especially at the cliff walk where Mr. Fitzwilliam lived. They were looking and watching for Nazi submarines. We saw them ourselves sometimes when the U-boats rose almost to the surface. They needed oxygen to run their engines to recharge their batteries. I’d seen once the gray top of a U-boat sticking up out of the water but I was all alone that day. I had tried to call the Coast Guard but I couldn’t get through. I didn’t get a chance to tell Uncle Gideon about it until later that day. Usually he reported the whereabouts of a sub immediately. It was never in the papers, any of this. It was something that we didn’t talk about. I think the government didn’t want the people along the coast to know. But we knew. If you lived with the Bathburns, you knew.

“We’re almost to Portland now,” said Mr. Henley. “I’ll leave you at Monument Square. And we can meet back there. But first I have to drop a package off at the dock.”

Soon we were passing the piers and wharves of Portland harbor. A huge cargo ship was docked along a wharf. And as we drove by, sailors and navy men and dockworkers carrying their lunch pails walked past us.

Mr. Henley delivered his package and then we climbed the hill, the car sputtering along. As we rose higher, the rain stopped and it felt like we were riding to the top of the sky, like we might lift up and fly away into the clouds. Then we would be able to see the harbor below and the bay and to imagine, beyond that, the ocean and all the capes and points and islands farther out.

At Monument Square, Derek got out of the car and looked back in at Mr. Henley. “We’ll see you here in one hour. Thanks.” He patted the top of the car just like Uncle Gideon always did and then he took my hand. Yes, Derek took my hand. He didn’t know it but suddenly I
was
flying over Portland. His hand felt warm and strong.

“Portland is peachy keen,” I said.

“You’re on the right trolley there,” Derek said, looking up at the tall buildings. Then, as if a cloud scattered a shadow across his face, he looked down. “We have to find the Eastland Park Hotel now, Fliss. We haven’t got a lot of time.”

But Derek and I were holding hands! I could feel his fingers entwined with mine. Brie was a million miles away.

We walked farther up the hill, past fancy department stores and ornate banks. Benoit and Company had American flags in every window and painted words on the building:
FOR VICTORY BUY WAR STAMPS AND BONDS
.

Most of the women and teenage girls passing us on the street were wearing cute little felt hats with veils, while all I had on was an orange woolen beret I had knitted myself. I buttoned up my jacket and held on tighter to Derek’s hand.

Derek looked wondrous against the city sky. We walked all the way up Congress Street and turned down High Street. There sat the Eastland Park Hotel with its grand-looking entrance. Derek froze on the steps and dropped my hand. He looked up at the tall building and he wouldn’t move.

There were quite a few sailors and naval officers on the steps. And there was a poster on a stand by the doors. It showed the ballroom inside the hotel filled to the brim with sailors and soldiers and girls dancing to a big band. The poster said,
FRIDAY NIGHT COUNT BASIE PLAYS AT THE EASTLAND. BRING YOUR GAL TO BEBOP, JITTERBUG, AND SWING
. I remembered for a moment that Derek and Brie were going to the autumn dance together.

“Come on,” said Derek suddenly. “Let’s go in. We have to be quick and quiet and calm. Okay?”

We walked in the doors and found twisted painted columns and arched doorways on all sides. There were steps up to the grand mezzanine, with plush rugs and soft-looking sofas and bright-colored Spanish tiles on the walls near the wooden front desk. “What a swanky place,” said Derek, rolling his eyes across the room.

“Your father must be dreadfully rich,” I said. I was hoping Derek would reach for my hand again, but he didn’t. Instead, he crossed the polished marble floor to the desk. There were hundreds of wooden cubbyholes for keys and messages and letters for the guests.

“Hello,” said Derek to the hotel manager. “We’re here to see one of your guests, my father, Edmund Blakely. Is he in?” Derek seemed to exaggerate the word
father
.

“I’m sorry to say he’s not,” said the manager. “Mr. Blakely only stayed one night with us last week and left. He does pick up his messages occasionally. Perhaps you’d like to leave him one.”

Derek backed up, shaking his head, and then he trailed away. I followed him.

We walked to the edge of the dining room and peeked in. On all the walls there were Egyptian murals, as if the dining room were in an Egyptian tomb. It was dimly lit and full of tables and every one of them was taken. There seemed to be naval officers and sailors and welders and ironworkers from the shipyard having lunch. We were told the government put up shipyard workers here. They said all the rooms in Portland were occupied because
shipyard workers from across the country were brought here to build the new Liberty ships for the war. I was feeling proud and pleased to see them all. But then, in the far corner, I spotted someone.

“Derek,” I said. “Do you see that fellow who has turned away from us now? Isn’t that Mr. Fitzwilliam having lunch over there?”

“What?” said Derek. “Yes, it does look like Fitzwilliam.”

There was also a fellow who appeared to be lunching with Mr. Fitzwilliam, or rather just leaving him, putting his share of the bill on the table. Quarters and nickels spilled out and rolled onto the floor. “I’d like to get a photo of the parade,” he called out to Mr. Fitzwilliam as he crossed the room and walked past us.

He took some photographs of the lobby. He dropped some newspapers on the tiled floor. He leaned over and picked them up, then pushed out the main doors. We went towards the glass double doors too. There was a small parade going down the street outside. There were several marching bands and soldiers carrying banners that read,
SUPPORT YOUR COUNTRY AND YOUR SOLDIERS. BUY WAR BONDS NOW
. It was too bad about the rain. It had started again. Umbrellas lined the street.

We were just going to go out the doors ourselves when we realized that the man had also dropped an envelope, a letter not yet mailed. It was lying there in the corner on the tiled floor near the exit.

Derek picked up the envelope. It was stamped and addressed to Louise Mack in Cape Elizabeth. “What should we do with this?” he said, handing me the envelope.

“I don’t know,” I said. Derek took my wrist then and sort of pulled me out through the doors on to the sidewalk. Sailors playing trumpets were pounding by. We could hear flutes scaling high notes and people cheering and clapping. We looked for the man who had dropped the envelope but it was quite crowded in spite of the rain and we didn’t see him.

We wove through flocks of people and umbrellas and then, because it was getting late, we headed back towards Monument Square to meet Mr. Henley. We had decided now to mail the letter for the man. But before we did, Derek became a bit curious and worked the seal open without damaging anything. Then of course we decided not to bother to mail it because the paper inside was completely blank.

“She mails things to the house, doesn’t she, your mother? I hear she’s as lovely as a butterfly,”
Mr. Fitzwilliam had said.
“Just as pretty and delicate as a swallowtail.”

The ride home in the dark would have been cozy but there was something looming in the stormy air. Bob Henley had offered a ride to a coastie who needed to be dropped off at the top of our peninsula. I had learned that a coastie was one of the Coast Guards who patrolled the shoreline and bluffs here. He was rather a rough fellow as all the coasties were. It was still raining, that dark, misty kind of rain and our windscreen wipers were slowly dragging back and forth over the glass. They only went as fast as we were traveling and we were moving slowly because it was hard to see with our dimmed headlights.

“Well,” said the coastie. “Come to find out, a freighter blew up a few miles out from Bailey Island two days ago. They’re saying it was a faulty boiler that exploded but I have my doubts. They never want to admit foul play. They don’t want to scare folks.”

Derek and I were sitting in the dark, listening. My hand and his were so near each other on the seat, so close, almost touching. Perhaps his hand was tingling and longing to be held like mine was. Perhaps. I wasn’t sure. Derek’s face looked serious and pale, the way it always did when he was thinking.

We were both wondering why Mr. Fitzwilliam had been at that hotel. Perhaps it had been a coincidence. The memory of him seemed now, in the wet, lonely night, to be floating in front of us in a shadowy, gloomy way. It was curious too that the letter we picked up had been blank. Why had the man sealed up a blank letter? The car sputtered and stalled and finally stopped at the edge of the road and we let the coastie out. He disappeared into the rainy night with a flashlight in his hand. Like our headlights, it had a piece of red cellophane over it to keep the light low.

When we finally got home it was rather late and The Gram was cross with us. Where had we been? Why did we go? Derek slipped away, leaving me to make up some story about writing a report for school on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I said I thought Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a jolly nice name. “I especially like the
Wadsworth
part, don’t you? And do you think he would still have been a famous poet if his last name had been
Shortfellow
instead of
Longfellow
?” I said. I tried to recite the poem Mr. Henley had told us, but I got the black wharves and Spanish sailors and the ships all mixed up and The Gram frowned.

Then I tried offering to play Parcheesi with The Gram and Uncle Gideon. That seemed to work, but the whole time they played, Uncle Gideon and The Gram were speaking German.

All the Bathburns were dreadfully good at languages. Even The Gram. Like Uncle Gideon, she spoke French and German. “Without a trace of an accent,” Aunt Miami told me once. It was another Bathburn trait, like winning at Parcheesi every single time. They had been speaking German quite a bit in the last few days and The Gram had been testing Uncle Gideon and hovering over his every German word.

The sun was shining quite brightly on the morning Derek’s dad was to visit. Derek had been awfully clever in picking the time and day for all this. The Gram and Auntie had gone to the greengrocer’s for shopping. Uncle Gideon had been fetched by the music teacher, Miss Elkin, in a car. She was terribly pleased to have Mr. Bathtub in her car. There was a large cello in its dark case sitting up in the backseat. As they drove off the cello looked a bit like a somber, unwilling passenger to me.

Derek had everything arranged and insisted before I was allowed to remain at the house that I keep his father’s visit a secret. “Fliss, like I said, this is my business. I want the visit to be nice. Will you bring the sandwiches and coffee on a tray? Will you also answer the door and escort my father in? I’ll be sitting in the living room, reading.”

“Very well,” I said. I went into the kitchen to check what we had for food. Just then I heard a knock at the back door. When I looked outside, someone was holding up a sign that said,
BOTTLEBAY SALVAGE SCRAP DRIVE
. Then a face peeked round the sign. As soon as I saw that pointed nose, I knew it was Stu Barker, Derek’s friend. I had to go and fetch all the flattened tins and bottles
and a jar of bacon fat we had collected above the cooker. Everybody also saved their worn tires and even their old rubber galoshes and handed them in. It was all to help the war. Stu Barker waved and carried everything off in a red wagon.

Afterwards, I peeked in at Derek in the parlor. He was lounging in a chair, swinging his legs back and forth in a nervous sort of way. I looked at the clock. It was a quarter to twelve. I put on a white apron and I wished I had one of those very keen white maid’s hats. I tried to frown and look terribly serious like a maid or a cook or a housekeeper. Then I went back and looked through the cupboards for something to serve. I finally came up with peanut butter, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwiches, a great Bathburn favorite. I had never had such a thing in England. (We used to have tomato sandwiches in London before the war, bread and butter and a slice of tomato. It was scrumptious with tea.) I decided to be awfully posh and I tried to cut the crusts off the bread. But the knife wasn’t sharp enough, so I ruined one of the sandwiches. I whistled a lovely tune to cheer myself up about that and I decided to eat the sandwich since it looked so pitiful all cut up and crooked.